THE Lonely Planet guide to the Languedoc-Roussillon region of the south of France makes no mention of Bugarach.

It suggests a driving route from Carcassonne to Perpignan that passes through some spectacular gorge scenery and takes you within a few miles of the place. But neither the village itself nor the striking mountain above it rate a name-check.

Some of the village’s 176 inhabitants would rather things had stayed that way but whether they like it or not, Bugarach has well and truly lost its obscurity. It has recently been described as the most famous village in France and in Paris a book has just been published about it entitled The Village Of The End Of The World.

If you believe some of the wilder accounts planeloads of Americans are heading there with one-way tickets while more reliable reports say locals are offering their properties for rent at £1,200 per night or spots to pitch a tent for £400.

How a French village, which eccentrics claim will be untouched by Armageddon in three weeks, is profiting from the prophets

The authorities admit they are on red alert – or what passes for it in the sleepy Corbières mountains, amid rumours that crazed cultists might try to organise a mass suicide ritual.

Fifty military police will be deployed in the village itself and another 50 will be standing by – even though it’s not obvious why anyone would travel to the only place on the planet where they’re not going to die simply to do away with themselves.

You may or may not have heard that the world is meant to be coming to an end in less than three weeks’ time. According to those who believe in this kind of stuff this is because the Mayan civilisation of Central America, which was at its height around 1,400 years ago, predicted an apocalypse on December 21, 2012. Apparently some people now think the only place anyone can survive the catastrophe will be Bugarach.

You may spot some flaws. First, there is little evidence the Mayans predicted any such thing. They simply organised their calendar in giant units of roughly 5,125 years.

They thought the world they lived in had begun in 3114BC and they dated the end of their calendar to the end of this present year. Most Mayan scholars say they didn’t see this as the end of creation, just the start of a new cycle.

Second, even if the Mayans did predict it that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen: they also believed in nourishing the sun through human sacrifice and they weren’t much good at predicting the final destruction of their own society by Spanish invaders. Lastly, it’s harder than you might think to find evidence that anyone really does believe this Bugarach stuff.

This part of France has long attracted people with eccentric beliefs, as well as those with an eye for exploiting them. In the 19th century, a priest called Abbé Bérenger Saunière apparently found a document at his church in the nearby village of Rennes-le-Château which somehow allowed him to make his fortune.

One theory was that he blackmailed the Vatican with evidence that Jesus had escaped from Palestine with Mary Magdalene and fathered a line of descendants.

This was developed in the best selling book The Holy Blood And The Holy Grail and later by Dan Brown in The Da Vinci Code – putting the village firmly on the tourist map.

However, Bugarach has been a focus for those looking for extraterrestrial rather than Vatican conspiracies. The 4,035ft Pic de Bugarach is described as an “upside-down mountain” because rock layers at the top are older than those at the bottom. This is a consequence of plate movement pushing lower layers upwards but the geological oddity – plus the fact it looks vaguely like the peak in Wyoming that played a key role in Steven Spielberg’s fi lm Close Encounters Of The Third Kind – has given the place a special aura. A magnet for UFO spotters, it has become a kind of French Roswell.

As British writer Val Wineyard, now living in Languedoc, puts it on the website UFO Digest: “If you climb up the mountain after sunset you will hear strange noises and see strange lights and the legends of strange lights and flying saucers are tumbling over each other for recognition.” She cites the legend of a huge lake under the mountain on which space-ships can sail until they need to return to their native planets.

It’s not clear where the rumours started but for the past few years speculation has mounted that “esoteric” cults were buying up property in the area around Bugarach in the belief that these under-the-mountain aliens would provide protection from the coming apocalypse.

The mayor Jean-Pierre Delord told a council meeting two years ago that special security measures might be needed to handle the influx on December 21 and the French government’s anti-sect watchdog started noting online references to the phenomenon.

That doesn’t mean anyone believes it. A Google search yesterday did yield tens of thousands of results but they were all articles about Bugarach fever, rather than promoting the belief itself.

I did find an excitable report from Yahoo! News saying “20,000 New Age believers… have saturated a small French commune near the foot of the picturesque Pic de Bugarach”, quoting as evidence a report in a respected British newspaper.

What the newspaper had actually reported was that 20,000 visitors had climbed the mountain last year, about double the figure the year before. Half-a-million people climb Snowdon every year but that doesn’t mean they’ve all started living at the foot of the mountain.

That didn’t stop another non-journalistic blogger copying out the Yahoo! story and writing: “Near the foot of the Pic de Bugarach an estimated 20,000 New Age believers await aliens who they say will rescue them from the impending apocalypse.”

Such Chinese whispers are a good example of how the fact that a news story goes viral doesn’t make it true.

It is categorically not the case that 20,000 New Age believers are sitting at the base of the mountain waiting to be rescued. If there were the journalists who have descended on the village in search of apocalyptic crazies would have found them.

Instead all they have found are closed shutters and other journalists.

Locals are sick of being asked by reporters if they are ready for the end of the world.

So those hoping to make a killing out Armageddon fever could be in for a disappointment. An American seller is hawking “souvineer [sic] rocks from Bugarach” on eBay at £15 a dozen while water from the local stream is reportedly also on offer at £12 a bottle.

But British-born villager Valerie Austin says she lost bookings at her holiday cottage over the summer because people who wanted a quiet retreat were put off by the media buzz.

Perhaps there really will be a last-minute influx of true believers.

If there isn’t there is one consolation for those hoping to cash in on Bugarach’s night in the spotlight.

With so few rooms available at least they can rent them out for silly money to the world’s press.